


Sunlight on a broken column

by inlovewithnight



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: AU, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-01-29
Updated: 2006-01-29
Packaged: 2017-10-15 21:44:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/165220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Dark.  AU.  Pegasus and Admiral Cain and all that is associated.  Spoilers through "Resurrection Ship 2."</p>
    </blockquote>





	Sunlight on a broken column

**Author's Note:**

> Dark. AU. Pegasus and Admiral Cain and all that is associated. Spoilers through "Resurrection Ship 2."

Helena Cain won Lee Adama’s loyalty the day he transferred to Pegasus. He’d been hoping for Atlantia; he’d requested and campaigned and pushed for Atlantia. If he was going to serve in the Colonial Fleet, he wanted it to be on the flagship, where he could get a glimpse of the politics at the top. That might come in useful when his service was up, in ways that combat drills and patrol runs wouldn’t. Assignment to Pegasus was a disappointment; everyone knew that Cain was a by-the-book hardass and that there were no political maneuverings on her watch. He stepped onto the Pegasus flight deck pissed off, and stayed that way until he entered his new CO’s office and gave his best salute.

“At ease,” she said, and he looked her in the eye for the first time. She was smiling; a cool, amused little smile, as if he was exactly what she expected to see, from boots to haircut.

“Lieutenant Adama,” she said, flipping rapidly through the folder on her desk. “Bill Adama’s son.”

It wasn’t a question, but she raised an eyebrow at him and he answered anyway. “Yes, sir.”

She closed the folder and tossed it aside. “I know him, Lieutenant. And I can tell you, based just on your record and what I see in front of me, I think you’ll be twice the officer he is.” She wasn’t smiling anymore, and her tone was as matter-of-fact as if she was telling him his own serial number. On this ship, Admiral Cain’s assessment was fact, not opinion. “Easily.”

If anyone had asked him on the Raptor flight to Pegasus, he would’ve said that he didn’t care, that he didn’t want to be an officer at all anymore, that he was putting in his time and getting the frak out of the Fleet.

If anyone had asked him when he stepped out of Cain’s office, he probably still would’ve said that, but with a great deal less conviction, and a great deal more of his mind considering, for the first time since he was ten years old, how he could make an officer of the Colonial Fleet proud.  
***  
He met her expectations, one after another, making Captain inside six months and racking up a list of commendations in his jacket. Cain didn’t hand those out lightly; he earned every one, and her cool smile across the desk was twice the reward of the notations on paper. He couldn’t think of what he wouldn’t do to hear that brisk, uninflected “Good work, Adama.” It meant something from her, the way military praise hadn’t since…well, the way it never really had. There had always been something hollow about it, before. But not from her.

She called him to her office one day, and when she let him stand at ease, she was smiling the same oddly amused smile as the first time, the one that said she knew exactly how the cards were going to play before they were even dealt. “I’ve had a request come in regarding you, Captain. From Fleet PR, if you can believe it.”

“Sir?”

“You know they’re decommissioning Galactica,” she said, leaning back in her chair and watching him carefully. He knew what she was looking for: the flicker of emotion he’d never been able to keep off his face and out of his eyes. It had earned him hell in school and right up through his early days in the Fleet, the way he couldn’t stop his feelings from playing out in the open like they were on a vidscreen.

He raised his chin a fraction higher and blocked the reaction, returning her cool, neutral expression with one of his own. He’d never bothered to work on developing a command face before he came here, before she had laughed at him across this very desk and said _I can read you like a book, Adama._

“PR thinks it would be a nice show if you went to the ceremony,” she went on. “Lead the fly-by, stand up next to your father while he gives his speech, let them take your picture. Give the civvies some warm fuzzy feelings about service being in the blood.” She was watching him carefully, closer than her casual posture would suggest. He clenched his jaw tighter, grinding his teeth until he thought they’d crack, fighting to keep his face blank in response to this utter bullshit. As if he gave a frak about wringing some good PR out of the family name.

“I’m inclined to deny the request,” she said abruptly, glancing down at the neat rows of paper on her desk. He exhaled, and she looked up at the sound, smiling—not reprovingly, but conspiratorially. “We have work to do around here, after all, and my pilots are not show ponies. Unless you have a burning desire to go see the old man step down.”

“I can catch it on the news, sir.” He drew his spine a little straighter under her approving nod. “I’d rather stay here and do my job.”

“Very well. Dismissed, Captain.” As always, she seemed to put him out of her mind with the words, and didn’t look at him again, so he allowed himself a smile and silent exultation as he stepped into the corridors. Thank the Gods for a CO who _understood_.  
***  
He would’ve re-upped for another tour under Admiral Cain. He knew it. The idea of the contempt in her eyes if he opted for discharge made his stomach turn. No frakking way would he have walked away from serving on Pegasus.

But then the attack came, and even the vague possibility vanished in waves of radiation and dust.

He thanked the Gods he wasn’t at that frakking ceremony, or on Atlantia, or any of the other ships in the Fleet, because then he’d be dead with the rest of them. He thanked the Gods he was serving a real commander, one who didn’t flinch or break, who had the strength to hold the entire ship together with her bare hands. Thank the Gods for Admiral Cain.

Some of the younger pilots, religious nuts from Geminon, said Cain must be touched by Athena, that the war-goddess might even have taken over the Admiral’s body in those horrible first hours. Lee didn’t buy it for a minute. He heard the stories from the CIC—Cain ordering a cold computer restart to stop the Cylon virus, Cain cutting network cables herself, Cain stopping panic with a glare and a few words before it could start spreading through the crew—and he knew that was nothing but the Admiral herself, fully human.

The CAG went down in the first wave of attacks, the CAG and a lot of others. One way or another, Lee was the highest ranker not carried off the flight deck on a stretcher, and so he took the report up to Admiral Cain.

She was sitting behind her desk when he entered, as always, but for the first time she looked almost small. Her shoulders were slumped, her hands pressed over her eyes, and he paid her the respect of looking away.

“Adama,” she said hoarsely, and when he turned and saluted, she was herself again, spine ramrod-straight and expression cool, only the redness of her eyes indicating that this was anything but routine. “What do we have left?”

He delivered the report, surprised somewhere in the back of his mind by the way his voice didn’t shake. Before he came here, it would have, he thought. He’d learned strength here on Pegasus, how to build a shell to support the weight of the job.

“I knew you’d be the one walking in here,” Cain said suddenly, staring at him across the desk. “I knew you’d make it through, Adama. Thank the Gods. I’m going to need you.”

“Sir.” Words flashed through his mind— _Whatever you need, sir; you have my complete confidence; I’m with you_ —but they were pointless. There was no need to tell her what she had known since the first time she saw him. He was her officer; she expected no less.  
***  
They kept the civilian fleet together for a week. It was a week from hell; FTL jumps on no warning, running dogfights that picked them off one pilot at a time, a general atmosphere of frantic terror that clawed at their sanity. Eventually they wound up at Ragnar Anchorage, and realized that the radiation field could give them a hiding place, somewhere to catch their breath and regroup.

He sat in her office with the rest of the senior staff, CAG by default, drawing up lists and mapping out possibilities while the rest of their little fleet patched up wounds. After three hours, the XO and the others left to take the watch. Lee stayed. She didn’t seem to realize he was there, but she hadn’t told him to go, and so he sat and watched as her pen moved endlessly, scrawling down the margins of papers, annotating lists until they were hopeless webs of words.

She pushed the page away at last. “We’re going to have to do it.” It was the Admiral speaking, voice as flat and neutral as if she was ordering an inspection, and he had no idea what she meant.

“Sir?”

She looked up, and he felt himself sitting straighter despite the exhaustion in his bones, her expectations calling the good soldier out of him as they always did. “If we’re going to fight this war, we can’t babysit the civilians. We’re going to have to cut them loose.”

He faltered, his calm fracturing as it hadn’t for a long time, even when the news of the attacks had reached Pegasus. She hadn’t permitted any of them to fall apart, not then; she let him have a minute for it now. “But Admiral, they’ll be sitting ducks without us.”

“At least it will go quickly for them,” she said, pulling a sheet of paper from one of the stacks and staring at it. “The Cylons will target the engine systems. It’ll be over almost instantly.”

“Admiral, these are _people_ , we can’t—” His voice choked off in his throat as his moment expired and her eyes snapped up from the paper to meet his.

“Listen to me, Captain.” Her voice was cold, precise, as empty as something mechanical, and hysterical thoughts of Cylons darted around the edges of his brain. He listened, though; his commander had given him an order, and he would never look away. “They are not people, not anymore. They are a dead limb, one that we have to cut off and toss aside if we’re going to have a chance at fighting these bastards. We can’t do a frakking thing if we’re dragging civilians along.”

“Sir…”

She didn’t hesitate, and the conviction in her voice was strong enough that to push his uncertainty aside. _She_ was strong enough, for all of them.

“Humanity is dead, Adama. We’re wiped out. Look at the numbers, there’s no way around it.” She threw a paper across the desk. “The best we can hope for is to kick the toasters off of our worlds and die on our own ground. But we _are_ going to die. It’s over.” She pressed her hands flat on the desk, and her shoulders slumped again. “The civilians are just getting out of it first.”

Her voice dropped on the last words, rough-edged and tired, and without thinking he reached across the desk to cover her hand with his.

She met his eyes with cold approval, and a trace of gratitude, and he silently swore again that he wouldn’t fail her.

“I’m going to do whatever I have to do,” she said. “Do you trust me, Captain?”

“Yes,” he said. “I do.”  
***  
He wasn’t there when she shot the XO, and he wasn’t there when the Marines extracted the resources from the civilian fleet. He should have been; he should have been in the CIC or piloting one of the Raptors that moved from ship to ship and carried the useful things back to Pegasus. He put himself on CAP instead, and even though no one said a word, he couldn’t help but feel like he’d run away.

By the time he was back on the ship, it had been hours since the Marines returned and the bodies had gone out the airlock. Eerie silence filled the corridors as he moved from the flight deck to the Admiral’s office to make his report. He heard a few muffled sobs as he passed the crew bunks, but all of the officers he saw were dry-eyed and going about their duties. Eyes fixed on the floor, faces pale, but attending to military protocol. Nothing less, on Pegasus. There was a kind of comfort in that: as long as Admiral Cain was in command, whatever else was gone, they would have discipline.

He stepped into the office and snapped immediately into a salute, as always. He heard the familiar “At ease” and looked across the desk, to find that she wasn’t there. He blinked at the empty chair in confusion, his brain too fogged and tired to follow a logical path.

A dry, harsh sound came from the far side of the room, and he turned toward it, flushing with embarrassment. Admiral Cain stood next to the sideboard, holding a glass of water and regarding him with an odd, twisted smile. He realized after another long second of confusion that the harsh sound was laughter. It didn’t have a trace of actual amusement or happiness in it, but that only made sense. Those had to be cut away and left behind, too.

He started his report, for lack of any other ideas. Distances flown, readings taken. They’d jumped away from Ragnar now, and there was no sign of the Cylons. They could’ve been on maneuvers again, running drills in deep space just to keep the Vipers from getting rusty. All of the horror could have been a bad dream, except that it was pounding in his head, a never-ending round of memory and possibility that didn’t let him eat or sleep or think.

“I suppose you’ve heard,” she said, after he finished speaking and they’d stood in silence for a minute. “About what happened.”

She still had the holster on her hip, he realized, even here in her office, and her hand had drifted over to rest over the handle of her gun. _I guess that’s how it works when you’re at war_ , he thought. He cleared his throat and tried to think of the right thing to say, finally giving up and only muttering, “Sir.”

“They made me do it,” she said, taking a step closer to him, trying to catch his gaze with her own, to force him to look into her eyes and find the conviction that was falling from his hands. “I can’t let things fall apart around here, Adama, or we’re all going to wind up dead.”

“I thought you said we were already dead.” He didn’t mean to say it; the words slipped out before he could think. She raised one eyebrow and he braced himself, waiting for it, the consequence that followed a careless action. Maybe she’d put a bullet in his head as well, right here in the office.

He jumped when her hand touched his face, cupping around his jaw and turning his head until he was looking at her, meeting her eyes after all. “All right,” she said, “so we’re dead. Don’t we deserve vengeance?”

The scriptures said so; the old stories of souls crying out to be avenged. He wasn’t so sure.

“You’re not giving up on me, are you, Adama?” she asked, her hand tensing against his face. “I need you to do your job until your number’s up, Captain. I need you to keep my planes in the air and my pilots in line. I need you to trust me, remember?” The words prickled along his skin like electric shocks, offering gravity in the vacuum, somewhere he could walk in the absence of the world.

If he was already dead, a walking corpse just waiting for its turn to be sent out the airlock and drift away, it would explain why his thoughts were so slow, why his skin was so cold, why he felt so heavy as she pressed her mouth against his. If he was already dead, this was all a dream, a shadow in the afterlife, and they were shades of themselves. It was the memory of a body that Admiral Cain backed up against the office wall, touched with hands as cold as his own, coaxed into response and then reaction.

It wasn’t him kissing her back, sliding his hands under her uniform, pushing her down to the floor. It wasn’t him leaving the CO’s office at ship’s midnight to slip down to the showers and let hot water pound his body until the scratches and half-formed bruises melted into uniform redness across his skin. It couldn’t be. He was already dead and gone, and this was just marking time.  
***  
He didn’t know how many others she gave that speech too, but the whole ship seemed to know: they were the walking dead, just waiting for a lucky shot to make it official. It was easier, being dead. You didn’t have to ask questions, didn’t have to find the energy to think. Just do your job, walk the line, go through the motions, and wait for your bullet.

He’d never been able to stop asking questions before. Even when he clenched his jaw till it ached and kept the words inside, he’d always challenged things in his head. Now that skeptical voice had faded away, and he was glad. Asking questions hurt. Thinking hurt. Staring straight ahead at the goal, counting hours until the bullet came along, following orders—those let the pain fade away, and on a good day it took memory with it, leaving a numb grey _now_ that drifted along by the numbers.

There were harsh moments that broke the numbness, like when they caught the Cylon infiltrator. And what followed. He threw up, after watching the first interrogation session, the first time since the attacks that he’d had a reaction to anything that was more than a flicker of static across the surface of his mind. He took every chance he could to run away again, logging as many hours in his Viper as he did on the deck. He wasn't the only one, either; everyone on Pegasus knew that the prisoner was a machine, a thing, and it deserved what it got, but that didn't mean they all wanted to watch it.

The Admiral knew what he was doing--he could see that in her eyes when she looked at him, cool not-quite disappointment-- and for the most part she let it pass. She only ordered him to the brig when she went to talk to the Cylon herself, and as her backup, not an interrogator. He never had to touch the prisoner at all, just keep it from lashing out.

The old sayings were right, you could get used to anything. By a week after they caught the Cylon, he could do his part of the job without flinching. He could shove his gun into its mouth and hold steady, staring down the barrel into the big eyes that were programmed to look so wild and pleading, and he felt nothing, not even that flicker of static. He didn’t bother to listen to the questions Cain snarled as she paced the room and circled the prisoner and kicked it over and over until it would’ve collapsed to the floor if it could. He just looked into those eyes, and waited, and listened to the seconds ticking away on the clock in his head that kept track of how much longer he had to stay.

He flew patrols and he fought battles, he talked to his pilots and he made sure the deck crew kept the Vipers running on spit and wire, he ate and he showered and he looked his reflection in the eye when he shaved. He reported to Admiral Cain’s office once a day, and he got down on his knees in front of her chair and put his mouth to her cunt, the zipper of her uniform cutting into his chin and her fingers digging into the back of his head as she gasped and shuddered and told him that she needed him. She couldn’t fight this war without his support.

He felt ancient and brittle, a mummy instead of a corpse, but what he had left was hers. What else was he going to do?

At night he slept as the dead had to sleep, deep and silent. He never dreamed about his family, or Kara Thrace, or the burned-out ashes of home. For that, when he remembered to think about Them at all, he thanked the Gods.  
***  
“I have a mission for you,” Admiral Cain said, not looking up from the desk.

“Anything you need,” he said, even though she already knew it; she didn’t even have to check his eyes anymore to know that he was ready and able, willing to serve, that he was her officer until the clock ran out. Even now, with Galactica flying alongside them and trailing a cloud of civilian ships. Even with this President who said that there was a chance, there was hope, there was Earth. Even with his father, who said that maybe they weren’t all dead after all. Even so. He was still Pegasus’ CAG, and he was still Cain’s officer, and it was far too late for the rest of it.

“Roslin and Adama have some kind of a frakking power play going on,” she said, still not looking up from her notes. “I can’t have it. I’m not going to let a kindergarten teacher and an old man end the war at this stage of the game.”

“No, sir.”

“Commander Adama’s requested that you come to dinner, hasn’t he?” She looked up, then, and he nodded. “I imagine his CAG will be there—Thrace, right?”

“I imagine so, sir.” Kind of a family reunion, a reenactment of Zak’s funeral over an exponentially larger coffin.

“Possibly the XO, as well.” Her hand dropped back, reaching down to her hip, and when it came into view again she was placing her own sidearm on the desk. “I need you to terminate Adama’s command, Captain,” she said, finally looking him in the eye. “I know it’s a hard order. But this has to be done.”

He stared at her, then down at the gun, then back again. Her gaze was searching him, expectant, but cool and certain as ever. She knew what she’d find, she always did, and if he was honest, there had never been a question. He would do his job.

“Can I trust you, Captain?”

He looked her in the eye, and somewhere far in the back of his mind, it occurred to him that she had never called him by his first name. He was grateful. Lee Adama never would have carried out an execution without judge and jury. Lee Adama would have offed himself weeks ago, if he’d made it through the attacks at all.

Thank the Gods Lee Adama was dead.  



End file.
